So, at the risk of irritating other designers, I’m going to give you guys some tips for how to step into Do It Yourself Design on a tight budget. There are “industry secrets” that can help you keep costs low but still create decent design. Obviously there is no substitute for a real designer. We’re trained by professionals, we have valuable experience, and we live & breathe this stuff. Ultimately, a professional designer will always produce better designs than a design hobbyist.

OK, enough of the caveats. On to the DIY Design Tools…

Typography

Let’s start with typography. Every design that involves letters should start with type choice.

By the way, the difference between a font and a typeface is this: typeface: the design of the letterforms (a.k.a. “glyphs”). font: the package the letterforms com in. Example: on a musical album, the songs themselves (chord structures, lyrics, melodies, harmonies) are the typeface. The CD or Record itself is the font.

1. Do not use Comic Sans.
2. Do not use Papyrus.
3. Do not use Times New Roman.
4. For printing, if you want to use Arial, don’t. Use Helvetica instead. The only time you should use Arial is on the internet. Besides, Arial is Microsoft’s lame attempt to copy Helvetica.
5. If you’re using Coolvetica, well, I’m sorry, but it’s really not that cool. Just use Helvetica instead, or change font types altogether.

So what do you do? You really only need a couple of go-to resources. My first suggestion is to regularly check out the MyFonts Specials page. The vast majority of typeface designs on the Specials page are good. Some are terrible, but at least you’ll be using something besides Comic Sans, Times New Roman, Papyrus or Arial. What? Do I sound like a snobby, overly self-important artsy-fartsy jerk? Well, maybe I am—but only when it comes to font choices.

Second, check out Jos Buivenga’s exljbris Font Foundry. Jos is a Dutch typographer in the forefront of new type design. His designs are friendly and approachable while also imparting a sense of stability, trustworthiness and precision. The heavier weights (bold, heavy) of his designs are very happy and fun. Calluna can be very serious and classic, while Calluna Sans can be more youthful. Bottom line: no matter what project you’re working on, Jos Buivenga’s fonts will work. You can’t go wrong here. Plus—and here’s the kicker—he offers at least one style of all his fonts for free! Yes, free. For many people, good typography starts with Jos.

Use font families. When you’re designing a layout, like a document, website, poster, et cetera, it’s ok to use more than one font. At the most, you should use three. It’s important that fonts match without duplicating each other. Here’s some easy rules to follow:

• Don’t use two different sans-serif typefaces in the same design (Calluna Sans & Gill Sans for instance).
• Don’t use two different serif typefaces in the same design (Jenson & Garamond for instance). The same goes for Slab styles (a.k.a. Egyptian styles), Script styles, et cetera.
• Do use different typefaces from the same type family together. For instance, Calluna & Calluna Sans are great together, as are all the fonts in the Museo family.
• Do use different typefaces from the same designer—as long as they aren’t the same style (see the first point above). For instance, Museo Slab for titles, Calluna Italic for subtitles and Calluna Sans for body text would be a good combination.
• Some other great typography houses to check out are Hoefler & Frere-Jones, TypeTogether, Alejandro Paul, and Erik Spiekerman.

Subscribe to the MyFonts email list. They send out great email newsletters that are short, beautiful, incredibly informative, and they will lead you to new, well-designed fonts.

Imagery

If you need imagery for a design, do not use clipart. Ever. Never ever. Head over to iStockphoto and spend a dollar on a stock photo or stock illustration. If you need to edit a vector illustration, download the free GIMP software.

Logo

Need a logo? Here’s where it gets sticky. Well, I guess everything in this post is potentially sticky, but that’s beside the point—unless you’re sticky. Logo design is really hard. Just being honest here. It takes a lot of time, effort, creative energy and skill to come up with a “good” logo. If you use a stock logo design company, or if you use one of the online logo contest sites, you will not be happy. Period. Maybe at first you’ll see your new logo and think, “Ooooh sparkles!” But in the end, there’s simply no way for a designer to communicate your vision, values and mission without interviewing you, working with you, and charging you a lot of money. So, if you need a logo, call me instead.

Can’t afford to hire me to design your logo? No problem. Just use a suitable typeface, set really big with the letters squished close together (called “kerning”).

• If you’re operating a serious business with lots of history and stability in your brand, use Officina, Jenson Pro or Calluna Sans or even Garamond Premiere Pro. Don’t use plain ol’ Garamond, though.
• If you’re historical and stable but also want to be modern and clean, try Meta, Museo Sans or Gotham. Gill Sans works sometimes as well for this.
• If you want to make sure you fit in, appear trustworthy, and maybe add just a smidgen of European flare, you can use Helvetica Neue (pronounced “Noy-uh”). Be forwarned, though: Helvetica is everywhere. That’s why it makes you fit in with everything. Seriously.
• If you’re a more youthful, organic business, try something like Calluna Sans, Museo Slab, Archer and/or Ideal Sans by Hoefler & Frere-Jones.

Layout

Use the Golden Ratio for everything. What’s the Golden Ratio? 1.62:1. Or, to be more geektastic about it, the Golden Ratio (a.k.a. Divine Ratio) is 1.618034 to 1.  That means if you draw a shape that is 1 inch tall, it should be 1.62 inches wide to fit in the Golden Ratio.  If your logo is 1 inch tall, it should be 1.62 inches wide.

The ratio scales up and down infinitely, so let’s say you’re doing a 1 page newsletter on a sheet of Letter (8.5×11 inches) paper. Let’s say 11 inches will become the “1″ in the ratio. Divide 11 by 1.62, and you get 6.79. So, you could make the main content portion of your page 6.79 inches wide, which leaves you 1.71 inches of width on the page for a little sidebar or table of contents or content callouts or contact info, etc.  Let’s take it another step. Divide 6.79 by 1.62 to get the next step down. The result is 4.19. So, make the header at the top of the newsletter 4.19 inches. And that’s the entire layout!  4.19 inch header (a.k.a. Masthead), 6.79 inch wide content area. Break it up into two columns for some visual interest. Also, put some stock photos in the content, and have text wrap around them.

Use staggered font weights. Have sections of content use headings in a Bold, large type size.  Also, if you’re using a sans serif for body type, use a serif for headings. If you’re using a serif for body content, use a sans serif for headings.  Use italics for long quotes.

Website Design

Get a free WordPress account and use one of the free themes, either the TwentyTen theme or a WooThemes theme. If you’ve got a little money to spend, set up an $8.00/month Rochen account and use the automatic scripts to install WordPress or Joomla. Then buy your own WordPress theme or Joomla theme. At that point, you can get a designer to install your theme for pretty cheap.

Have any other suggestions for people? Share them below in the comments! I’m skimming the surface of lowest common denominator here, and honestly, I don’t really follow any of these suggestions, but for those who need to do desktop publishing cheaply and quickly, I think I’ve given you some good tools here.

The Woman’s Club didn’t really have a definite logo, so I created a customized script logotype for them that they could identify with.

As part of the package, I maintain the site for the Club on an ongoing basis, adding new photos when necessary and update the content on the site.

In the end, the favorite version of my designs was the one using good ol’ Helvetica. I usually steer away from using Helvetica too much, as it is so ubiquitous, but in this case it kept enough of an air of seriousness that it benefited this particular execution beautifully.

I’ve attached here three versions of the logo, showing it in various usage.

I started with the mighty Jos Buivenga’s Museo Sans font for the precision and geometric properties, then manipulated it until it could be used as a graffiti stencil. Then I distressed it further, adding paint splatters and an overspray boundary until the client was happy with the amount of grunge.  I initially used a much cleaner version where just the “A!” was stenciled, but the client really wanted some serious grunge, so I poured it on thick!

The identity system is built around the idea of graffiti.  The “A!” can be used separately from the logo in various applications, as shown in some production comps I threw together:

Digital comp of the Awaken logo in stencil format

This project included several other elements, which each have their own portfolio entries:

Awaken City Church website design

Pre-launch promotional card design, tee shirt design, exterior large format signage

As you will see through this series, having a good knowlege of your client does not guarantee a quick design solution.For this client, I wanted to emphasize the community and global aspects of their mission without negating either side.  It’s a fine line to walk – community vs. ubiquity, but I set out toward that end with the logo comps in my previous post.  I began with the concept of the Trinity – the theological term that describes how God is one in His nature, but three in person.  It’s a mind trip, to be sure, but God is completely and eternally unified and is a single entity, yet He is also eternally revealed in three distinct persons (Father, Son, Holy Spirit).  As you can see, this is the perfect reference point for an organization that seeks to empower it’s members to be unique, singular, and different from each other, yet simultaneously unified under a set of common goals and values.  A community of unified individuals.  It’s quite a wonderful paradox, just like the Trinity.

Trinity Symbol (Triquetra)

So, I began with the Trinity symbol: three distinct lobes that are connected to form a single unit.  Kind of like a moebius strip.  The second inspiration for my first designs was the concept of growth and newness.  Therefore, I created a design that referenced plant forms, without overstating the “leafiness” of the forms.  I chose Helvetica as the wordmark because of it’s ubiquity and immediacy to the viewer, also because it is used internationally and can bear the weight of a large organization.  The “international” wordmark uses Museo, and great new semi-slab serif typeface from Jos Buivenga.  Museo is also an international font, and retains a bit of the classical feel of slab serifs, but is distinctly new, while Helvetica carries an age, despite the fact that it’s a sans serif.  I’ll attach the logo, in case you haven’t read my previous post:

First Logo Comp

As you can see, I also worked a cross into the negative space of the logomark, as a response to one of the main tenets of Grace Churches’ mission is that it’s members are unified by way of the cross of Christ.  The response to this logo was generally positive, but it wasn’t right for them, and reminded some of the leadership of Christmas poinsettias.  Ha!  What’s funny is that I didn’t see that coming!  As soon as the client said it, I chuckled and now that’s all I can see when I look at it.  The human brain is a funny thing.

Now onto the image at the top of this post.  After the first logo’s rejection, I still wanted to stick to the organic idea, and move into an idea I had of a spirograph – overlapping shapes that create a new shape at their intersection.  The images in the graphic at the top of this post are the result of some expirimentation toward that end.  The problem with them is I was still aiming at too young of a target crowd.  Those images work on their own, but when tied to Grace Churches International, they stop working because they don’t carry enough professionalism.  The Grace Churches leadership opperates with a strong work ethic, and these new logo ideas didn’t show that.

Tune in next time to see the next step – still clinging to some youthfulness, but with less pizzaz…

I’ll be using this opportunity to take you all through my typical logo creation process.  You’ll see the good, the bad and the ugly.  The rejected designs, the ones I liked but the client didn’t, and pretty much everything in-between.

This post shows the first completed design ideas I presented to the client.  They came with a full color scheme as well.  What’s so funny about this, and is not all that unusual in the design business was my client’s reaction to these designs:  “We don’t sell Christmas poinsettias.”

Gotta love that red and green Christmas image that’s been burned into all American’s brains!

In my next post, I’ll explain the purpose of my client’s organization and mission, and you’ll get a better idea of why this logo brought that reaction.

The site serves two functions: to provide a store front to sell their products (both food and non-food items), and to give their customers lots of articles to read.  At first, I organized the site via two menus: Explore Coffee and Buy Coffee.  Since they used my CMS service, they began writing up all the “Explore” articles during development while I set up the store.  They ended up not using the simplified two menu system, opting for a less-organized approach.  To solve the usability issues of having unclear navigation, I added a section to the top of each page with two custom graphics that link to either the main Explore section, or to the Store Front.

The look of the site is based on the corporate identity that I created for the Captain’s Coffee, including the logo, logotype, color scheme and the overall “feel” of the site.

Because of the CMS service, the business’ employess and owners can change anything on the site that they like.  They told me multiple times that they love the way they are able to update the site, including all the store’s products.  They had been using an ecommerce solution called MonsterCommerce, provided by Network Solutions.  It’s a rather cumbersome process to get anything done on a MonsterCommerce site when compared with the system I give my customers.

So far, the feedback from both my client and their customers has been glowing!  Their older customers find the site intuitive and easy to navigate, and their younger customers enjoy the updated look and the security of the integrated credit card payments with SSL encryption.

Have a look and let me know what you think!

You’ve probably noticed at your local grocery store or gas station that Pepsico has come out with a new corporate identity.  It’s clearly an attempt at an evolutionary (vs. revolutionary) change, with a similar color palette and predominantly blue background on the flagship product, Pepsi.  I think it’s a bad identity.  Find out why after the jump.

A logo refresh, and certainly a new corporate identity should push a company forward into it’s growing vision.  Branding should reflect where a company will be in ten years, and if properly done, will propel the company into that vision.  It should never be done to fit in better with “the crowd” or to better adhere to a current design trend.  Here’s the first thing that pops into most people’s minds when they view these:

“So Pepsi voted for Obama?”  At which point the Pepsi executives would say, “No, that’s not the Obama logo – it’s a stylized smiley face!  Isn’t that fun?”  Well, it sure doesn’t look like a smile to me, and I’m all about symbolism and implied meanings.  It looks like a bad print job of the old Pepsi logo.

There’s a lot that’s bad about this, from the nauseating “e” in “pepsi”, to the clinical, cold layout, to the fact that it looks like the packaging for an mp3 player more than a food product.  Plus, the logo changes depending on the drink!  Come on, guys!  That aspect seems to have been an afterthought, since with the pepsi max can, the logo has a much larger “grin”, depicting the higher caffeine amount in the drink, but the rest of the pepsi max can is bland, boring, grey, clinical and sterile.  If you’re going to change the logo to depict a more exciting customer experience, you have to follow through with the entire package – which they have not done.

This new look seeks to set itself apart from the competition, which it does indeed.  I’ll give them that: they stick out like a sore thumb, or like a medical appliance in the frozen foods section.

Feel free to comment, especially if you disagree with me.  I know there are mixed opinions on this out there.

I developed the new logo, typography choices, color scheme and overall brand image.  The collateral produced included new business cards, business card magnets, invoices and a new web site.